


I Saw Three Ships

by bardbarianrage



Series: The Mariner's Child [1]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Colonization, Gen, Young America
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-09
Updated: 2013-06-09
Packaged: 2017-12-14 11:50:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/836565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bardbarianrage/pseuds/bardbarianrage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which a burgeoning nation experiences ch-ch-ch-changes brought over by the Old World.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Saw Three Ships

One day- a day- when the light was bright and the wind was strong, they came, the strangers, from across the horizon.

And the slumbering land awoke.

He liked them- the way they glittered and glistened as wet stones did, wavering in river rippled heat. He followed the current carried by their tongues- chattering, gurgling,smooth, honeyed intonations, lilting pitched alien bird song, more captivating as the days wore when at last the hushed sussuration of leaves was not enough. They were dream time sounds so unlike the voices of those who roamed the valleys alongside him, those who sounded of the red earth, crouched in forests, journeyers of the high grasses in which he played. Rain dripping, eagles crying, foliage swaying in the breeze. All subdued under the thunder claps and lyrical calls which became the lining of his waking mind.

In great white clouds the strangers came - trickling thinly in as streams before their floods ascended and the whole of them came down in mighty storms . Many rhythms gushing, innumerable incomprehensible dreams birthing in his mind.

When he looked upon himself in the water, he watched his body change with the metamorphose of lands. There were dew drop mornings where his flesh faded to the color of pale sand, glowing in daylight where too his eyes caught the blue from the sky and did not change back.

He felt the disappearance of Old Ones as he observed, yet upon glancing over his shoulder then turning back from a lonely nothingness , he saw the darkness gone from his head and the sun instead, descended above his shoulders.

As radiant as the golden creatures. Their peculiar faces with the features that slowly, as he watched in the puddles, became his own .

Soon, before too many seasons had passed, they became a part of his home, increasingly an extension of him as he gradually became a child of theirs . Some drifted in and out on the ebb and flow of the seas, but for their absence, others returned.

And he found that though he liked them all, there was one who touched him deeply- in the caves, depths of rivers- the pitch dark of their bottoms, up to the empty cliff peaks, the pines ’ tallest points piercing an everlasting sky it changed him. He listened and watched and felt. Saw the stranger-people’s kind, cruel, agonized, ecstatic, humbled, prideful, fearful, wrathful, tender hands and wanted this one, this particular stranger, to share it all with him.

He with the hair of freshly dying wheat and inset eyes of mossy forest floors.

The one whose lips never bespoke their own silent longing, echoed in the loneliest fissures of the mountains.

When the day had come to be hunted, the land stood strong with the bravery of his people and an odd aching of his heart, until a distant speech pitched high in excitement and he tumbled into a clearing.

He was cajoled with scents of foreign pleasure from the father of flowers, nearly tasted richness yet unobtainable by his own hands- seduced and bewildered by the lure of music from the father of the bright lands across the sea, and the father of the cold lands with his gentle smiles and silent partner.

He was offered nothing from the anguished father of the caterpillar brows .

And, happily, he accepted.

Took a warm hand and let his own disappear beneath long, shock curled fingers.

“I am glad you came.”


End file.
